Murderous Spoils

Six mana for a removal spell is a steep tax, and Murderous Spoils only makes sense once you read the rider as the real product. Darksteel was the Equipment block: a set where the gear on a creature was often worth more than the creature, and where attaching a Sword of Fire and Ice or a piece of indestructible Darksteel hardware turned a vanilla body into a threat. This card answers that environment by punishing the investment twice. It kills the carrier (no black targets, no regeneration to save it), then keeps everything it was holding, transferring permanent control of the Equipment to you. The destroyed creature is the lesser loss; the stripped gear is the windfall. That two-for-one against the block's central mechanic is what justifies the price, though it also explains why the card never traveled: outside an Equipment-saturated board, you are paying six mana at instant speed for a conditional removal spell, and the upside clause does nothing. It reads as a clean, almost surgical piece of set-specific design: a removal spell built to answer a single archetype by stealing the thing that archetype was built around.